research showed the safety measure offered strong protection for
healthcare workers against sharps injuries and the threat of blood-
borne diseases like HIV and hepatitis. Still, it's taken a while to catch
on.
Fast forward to 2019, and Dr. Berguer says he sees steady progress
in the effort to get surgeons to double-glove, estimating that half of
surgeons double-glove today.
"That might be slightly optimistic, but it tells me we've made
progress." says Dr. Berguer, a general surgeon at Contra Costa
Regional Medical Center and John Muir Medical Center, both locat-
ed in California.
Everyone wants to keep their staff protected against sharps injuries
and unnecessary contact with patient bodily fluids, and double-gloving
is a great place to start. Research indicates surgeons and first assis-
tants suffer nearly 60% of the injuries that happen in the OR. Scrub
nurses and scrub technicians are next, accounting for about 19% of OR
injuries. Putting on a second pair of gloves is one of the simplest things
your OR staff can do to stay safe.
If you're not double-gloving, these OR safety experts make the case
for you to start.
Remember the stakes
Janine Jagger, MPH, PhD, traces the movement to double-glove all the
way back to the 1980s. A big takeaway from that era still endures: A sin-
gle needlestick can change a healthcare worker's life forever.
The height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic put healthcare personnel in a
perilous position, and that wasn't the only threat they faced. U.S.
healthcare workers contracted about 12,000 hepatitis B cases annual-
ly at that time, says Dr. Jagger, professor emeritus of medicine at the
University of Virginia School of Medicine and founder of the
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